Welcome
to Mike & Tom's family history site, where we spin out
the true-life stories of the colorful cast of characters populating the
Delehanty-Sullivan-Kinsman-Schroeder families of Minnesota-Michigan-New
York-Vermont-and-Maine (yep, those
Delehanty-Sullivan-Kinsman-Schroeders).

Researching & writingabout this motley &
loveable bunch of folks has been incredibly fun. It's also
generated an incredible amount of paperwork. Enough! This
site is our workspace. Like our family history project it remains very much a work in progress.

Despite the bad
jokes (mostly Tom's), at
the core of what we do here lies an abiding commitment to scholarly
rigor in understanding the lineaments of our ancestors' lives.
Using evidence culled from these pages, for
instance,
Judith E. Anderson, Ph.D. examines "Haunted Minds: The Impact of Combat Exposure on the
Mental and Physical Health of Civil War Veterans" in
the book Years of Change & Suffering: Modern Perspectives on Civil
War Medicine (Edinborough Press, 2009). It's a
tragic story about PTSD and an abusive failed marriage in the late 1860s
featuring our g-g-grandparents Nellie Kinsman and Frank Lang. On a
lighter note, we demonstrate conclusively that our dad Harry was the kid
after whom Charles Schulz named the Beethoven-loving Lucy-allergic
"Schroeder" in his comic strip Peanuts. And that our
great-great grandmother got her liquor from a cucumber. And so
much more.

Fact is, here at
FamilyHistoryFiles.com we're dead serious about the dead.
In the spirit of an Irish wake, our goal is to celebrate & honor the
memory of our ancestors & have fun doing it.

Check it out! 

A full-length book manuscript modestly titled
The Awesomely Gripping Saga, written in three frenzied weeks in late 2005, the
project that got this whole family history ball rolling again

What began as an
essay
on the life & ancestry of our grandfather John Delehanty, born in
1886 among the slate quarrymen and women of West Castleton, Vermont
 with special attention to his most interesting mother, the Irish
immigrant washerwoman Bridget Waters  that eventually grew
into another website embedded within this one:
Mike's West
Castleton Journal

Interpretive essays
& documents on our great-great-grandmother
Nellie Kinsman
Lang Blow Church, from her birth in 1848 in rural southern New
York to her death in 1927 in gritty 'nordeast' Minneapolis, whose
ancestry we trace to before the birth of Shakespeare, and whose
life entwined with all kinds of memorable characters  like
her first husband, our g-g-grandfather Frank Lang, a
charming but abusive
German immigrant suffering PTSD from his two-plus years as a
hospital attendant in the Union Army . . . and her second husband Louis Bleau
dit Rossignal (Louis Blow),
displaced from the Red River Valley in the Mιtis diaspora, who
brought Nellie and her girls into his extended family and died a
tragic early death (murdered in an ethnic-racial dispute in rural Anoka County)  a family
centered on his sister Marguerite Bleau dit Rossignal (Kas-Kas-Ka-Na-Gee)
and her husband Bailey T. Baldwin,
a transplanted Alabaman, maybe part Cherokee, a strapping
frontiersman and Union soldier who came out of the Civil War blind
and disabled  an extraordinary couple who, by the bigness of their
hearts and despite all their own hardships, helped Nellie and her
girls, including little Jennie Lang,
our great-grandmother,
survive the very hard years of the 1870s

And many other
intriguing tales of scrappiness, love, struggle, and
survival.

This dancing magic pickle caged by a hyperlink symbolizes our
commitment to maintaining a dancing magic pickle free site.
Contact us for more details, or click directly on the pickle dancing in the
cage for a synopsis of the
philosophy inspiring this